Il ratto di Ganimede

The myth is simple. Zeus, in the shape of an eagle, snatches up the beautiful boy Ganymede to pour wine for the gods. Painters had always shown a graceful youth, half willing. In 1635 Rembrandt did something almost comic and genuinely unsettling instead. His Ganymede is a fat, howling infant, red-faced and wetting himself in fright as the great bird hauls him into a dark sky by the seat of his shirt. Scholars read the picture against Dutch life of the time, when so many children died young. To them it is less an erotic abduction than an image of grief, a small child carried from the world too soon, the eagle a kind of death lifting him up to God. In his fist he still grips a cherry, the old sign of a child's innocence.